them. The energetic English genius wishes that they should regulate
our life; that we should act in accordance with them, so that no tragic
complication should form itself, which could only be solved by the ruin
and death of the innocent together with the guilty. The monologue
concludes thus:--

O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!

Nevertheless, Hamlet continues his voyage.

The reader will remember that Montaigne spoke of an instinctive impulse
of the will--a daimon--by which he often, and to his final advantage,
had allowed himself to be guided, so much so that such strong impulses
might be attributed to divine inspiration. A daimon of this kind,
under whose influence Hamlet acts, is described in the second scene of
the fifth act. The passage is wanting in the first quarto. [48] Hamlet
tells Horatio how he lay in the ship, and how in his heart there was a
kind of fighting which would not let him sleep. This harassing condition,
the result of his unmanly indecision, he depicts in these words:--

Methought I lay
Worse than the mutines in the bilboes.

Then all at once (how could an impulsive manner of action be better
described?), before he could 'make a prologue to his brains,' Hamlet
lets himself be overcome by such a daimonic influence. He breaks open
the grand commission of others, forges a seal with a signet in his
possession, becomes a murderer of two innocent men, and draws the evil
conclusion therefrom:--